Addicted to novelty since 2001

Dot Org, Dot Schmorg

December 20, 04

My colleagues like to tell me that URLs are dead. Recent events in American government demonstrate otherwise. As you’ll recall, there was that whole URL fiasco during the vice-presidential debate. Now we turn to Illinois, where the governor is on the warpath to outlaw violent video games. From the excellent gaming blog Kotaku:

To help bolster his point of view, the state’s school officials pointed parents to a web site set up to promote the governor’s new initiative. Problem is, they pointed to the wrong address. When parent’s went to www.safegamesillinois.com they found a site attacking the governor’s idea and links to pages on Amazon.com that let you buy the sorts of games the governor wants to put the kibosh on. The real site is www.safegamesillinois.org. Fortunately for the governor, the .com site is a mature attack on his position and not a bunch of pictures of him playing patty-cake with a Norwegian stripper dressed-up like a very naughty teacher.

The .com folks (while not grammarians–“below is all the mature video games”) are advocates of both free speech and capitalism. Nice work. What’s the lesson? Check your URLs before embarking on any kind of campaign. Both sites need to improve on their SEO.

2 Responses to “Dot Org, Dot Schmorg”

I was watching the evening news about a week ago and the anchor actually said “dot C-O-M” at the end of an URL. I don’t think I’ve heard that in years.
I also saw my doctor last week and said I’d look something up on the web. She said, “Oh, that’s right. You’re the computer girl.” Uh….I guess some people are still new to the Internet.